How Can the Value of Top-of-Funnel Channels be Measured - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Rand has talked many times about what he calls "serendipitous marketing," where the work we do at the top of the funnel can take winding and often unexpected paths to conversions. One of the most common questions about content marketing, public relations, and other top-of-funnel efforts is how to prove their value.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers up three ways you can attempt those measurements, along with a bit of perspective you can bring to your clients and higher-ups.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz Fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk about the value of top of the funnel demand creation, sorts of channels and tactics, and how you can actually measure the value behind them.

I'm guilty of doing something. I'm going to own up to it. A lot of the time when I talk about these kinds of tactics, stuff that sits at the very top of the funnel that creates that demand or interest in your potential target market, I call them serendipitous and unmeasurable channels. It is true that many of them are very serendipitous, but it's not entirely true that they're completely unmeasurable. They're just very, very hard to measure, but not impossible.

So today I'm going to walk you through that, not because I actually expect you to go and try and do this with every one of those serendipitous, hard to measure channels, but because I think you need to, as a marketer, have this in your toolbox and in your knowledge kit so that when your CMO, your boss, your client, your manager, your team says, "Hey how do we know that xyz is producing returns," you can say, "Actually, we don't know that." Or, "We proved it once, and we have the data from then. We continue to believe that it will drive investment. But here's how tough it is to measure, and this is why we continue to invest in it and believe in it as a channel even though we don't have the proof."

So bear with me for a second. You've got your classic marketing funnel. Top of funnel stuff is like creating that awareness of the issue, the problem, the challenge, your industry. Your middle of the funnel is where you're showing off your solution. The bottom of the funnel is usually where you're convincing folks to convert and then trying to retain people. So this is fairly simplistic. Most marketers are familiar with it.

The stuff that fits into this creating awareness bucket, that very top of funnel demand creation stuff, those are things like: public relations, getting in news and media and press coverage; a lot of social media engagement, especially social media that is not directly tied to either supporting your product or pushing your product is in that bucket; a lot of conferences, events, trade shows, booths; certainly all those coffee and beer meetings that you might have with people in your field, people outside of your field, and people who are curious; a lot of those serendipitous meetings.

Anything that it fits into what we call top of funnel, which I actually like the shortened acronym there TOFU, TOFU content marketing. Much of the content that content marketers invested in and create is designed to be kind of above the funnel, before people are actually interested in your product or solution. Actually, this includes a lot of things that are brand advertising focused, that are just creating awareness of who you are as a company and that you exist, without specifically talking about the problem folks are facing or your solution to that problem.

So proving the value of this stuff is insanely hard. Let's use public relations as an example. The classic yard stick that PR professionals have traditionally reported on are number of stories and the quality of those stories and pieces, and where they've been published. That's a lot like in the SEO world reporting rankings and traffic. They're very high level metrics. They're sort of interesting to know. But then you have to have the belief that they connect up, that the rankings and the traffic are going to connect up to conversions, or that getting all those print pieces on the web, getting those links, or whatever is going to convert.

This is tough. The way to prove the value of this is you basically have these three options. You can segment, meaning that you segment by something like an industry vertical, by the demographics of your target, pr by geography. I'll give you an example of this.

So Moz might say, "Hey, we really think that among urban professionals in the technical marketing fields, that is who we're going to bias all of our public relations efforts to over the next year." So we're going to tell our PR firm, our in-house PR person, "Hey, that's what we want you to focus on. Get us the publications that are relevant to those folks, that are read by them on and off the Web. That's where we want to be."

This is interesting, because it means that we can then in the future actually go and measure like, "Well yeah, we had this kind of a result with that particular group that we targeted with PR." We had this much lower result with this other group that we didn't target with PR, that we could the next quarter or the next year. This is one way of doing it.

Geography actually is the most common way that I see a lot of startups and technology companies doing this. They basically focus all their efforts around a particular city or a particular state or region, sometimes even a country, and they'll do this.

At one point, I actually did run a split test using Sweden and Norway, which were places where I visited several people from Moz over the course of a couple years, spoke at some conferences and events, and then we looked at our traffic from those countries, our coverage in those countries, our links from those countries, and eventually our conversions from those countries. We did see a lift, kind of suggesting to us that maybe there was some value in those conferences.

Number two, the second way to do this is you can invest in a channel or tactic for only one of your product lines. If we're at Moz, we're going to say, "Hey, you know what? We're going to do a lot of public relations for Followerwonk specifically, but we are not going to do it for our SEO products. We're not going to do it for Moz Local. But let's see how that goes." This is another sort of segmentation tactic and can be effective. If you see that it works very well for one particular product, you might try repeating it for others.

Then the third one is that you can invest for a limited period of time. Now what's sad is this one is kind of the most common, but also the worst by far. The reason it's the worst by far, at least usually, is because most of the work that goes into any of these types of channels, think about it, press and PR, or a coffee and a beer meeting, or going to conferences and events, oftentimes takes a long time to show its value. It builds upon itself. So if I'm doing lots of in-person meetings, some of those will filter back and build on themselves. If you hear about Moz from one or two people in Seattle, well, okay, that's one signal. If you hear about it from 10, that's another thing. That might have a different kind of impact on how our brand gets out there.

So this time period stuff I really don't recommend and usually don't like. There are cases where it can be okay.

In all three of these, though, what makes it so incredibly challenging is that we have to be able to observe a number of metrics and then try and take the segments that we're supposed to be looking at, whether that's time or a product or a vertical or geography, and we want to observe metrics like traffic. We might try to look at mentions, especially for PR and branding focused stuff. We might look at links. We might look at conversion rate and total conversions. Then we have to try and control for every other thing that we're doing in our marketing that might or might not have affected those metrics as they apply to these channels.

This is why honestly that control bit is so hard. Who's to say whether public relations are really because we did a big PR effort and we talked to a lot of folks? Or is it because our products got a lot better, customers started buzzing about us, and the industry was turning our way anyway? We would have gotten 50% of those mentions even if we hadn't invested in PR. I don't know.

This is why a lot of the time with these forms of marketing, my bias is to say, "You know what? You need to use your educated opinion, and you need to believe in and invest in the quantity of serendipity that you believe you can afford or that you can't afford not to do, rather than trying to perfectly measure the value that you're getting out of these."

It's possible, but it is tremendously challenging. These are some ways that you can try it if you'd like to. I'd love to hear from all of you in the comments, especially if you've invested in this type of stuff in the past or if you have other ways of valuing, of figuring out, and of convincing your managers, your clients, your bosses, your teams to go put some dollars and energy behind these.

All right everyone, we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Apart doing what Rand says in the WBF, I've tested this thing with good results.

A client of mine has it CEO and others VPs public speaking a lot, so doing classic face to face relationship marketing. What I asked them to do was to do something very common: giving business cards. The news was that the web address was a shortened URL with an ad-hoc GA tracking parameter, so we could see if those public meetings were generating traffic, also as a way to confirm direct and brand organic traffic peaks.

More over, if they were presenting with a deck or a video, that content was always hosted and published first in their news/blog section and the link offered to the public for watching the deck/video, again, was a shortened campaign-tagged URL.

Smart! Anything you can do to get some more data is great, especially if it's a known, major channel. Obviously, in those scenarios, chances are good that many of the recipeients of those cards ended up just searching for the person/company and thus, weren't trackable, but at least there's some sense for whether it worked!

Trying to predict the ranking or traffic effect of certain TOFU actions is like Chaos Theory in action. Admittedly I might be stretching the theory a little here but according to Wikipedia: Small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

At a Conference, for example, where you end up standing to grab yourself a coffee might trigger a conversation that could ultimately lead to a massive business deal, a PR opportunity, etc. So, a small difference in this initial condition can create a very different outcome. The same goes for many different TOFU activities.

Going back to Kelvin's presentation, we are going to have an increasingly difficult time trying to reverse engineer (aka understand) Google since it is becoming more of a machine learning company; referring to the acquisition of Deepmind. Some of the points he was making were truly fascinating:

When machines teach themselves; they solve problems in ways we can't understand or reverse engineer.

Algorithms can react in peculiar ways when they come into contact with other algorithms, and the real world

Even with billions at stake, the world’s greatest scientists cannot predict the outcomes of a complex and chaotic system with precision (such as the weather)

In this context it is interesting to see that when SEO Professionals are involved in more "traditional" marketing communication and branding tasks, we are still trying to find causality when correlation is probably the best we will be able to achieve. I also have a tendency of wanting to come up with a IF THIS THEN THAT solution to a problem, but this is becoming increasingly difficult... and it is doing my head in to be honest ;-)

In a previous life I have done loads of PR and as you mentioned it is notoriously difficult to predict the outcome of a specific action/activity. But also, the more you get yourself out there, the more likely it is for Serendipity to emerge. So it is indeed about trying to figure out which actions are most likely to help you achieve a a certain goal. Which are the base conditions needed? In this context it is interesting to see how David Sotimano, from Distilled, used machine learning to try and figure out why some Distilled blog posts performed well (as to organic traffic), while other posts didn’t perform well at all. Results were not conclusive but the approach certainly showed an opportunity for the future as to defining the base conditions maybe? What is required, but not necessarily sufficient?

Reverse Engineering a Hit?

I often think that what we are trying to achieve with a piece of content, is what musicians are trying to achieve with their music... a hit = going viral. Is there a sure recipe for creating a musical hit? Not really, but there probably are some things you really need to do in order to optimise your chances.

So this is probably what we need to define for ourselves? What can we do in order to optimise our chances towards a positive outcome... and isn't this what we have always done? Except that it seems to become increasingly difficult.

I just realised that I have written loads, without actually contributing any practical solutions. Really looking forward to the further comments though.

"Educated opinion" - how I wish more marketers would use this! Sometimes the numbers don't tell the full story/provide the right context or vision, so teams face gridlock when all it takes is someone sharing their educated opinion. The problem, though, is that too many organizations don't empower their teams with the confidence, trust, or budgets to go for what they believe is right.

I completely agree with Rand's point about option 3 'under prove the value of this stuff'. As a B2B marketer I have a relationship based marketing model and we know that our own sales cycle sits between 6 months to 2 years. So no we don't rely on using this option. I assume it would be more relevant to marketers in a transactional based business environment e.g. e-commerce models, which I have been involved in and where campaign results analysis can be measured in hours, days etc.

My only real work around here when our PR team write content for our newsletters, blogs etc. is to use campaign url parameters. I do not tell a lie here but we measured a lead to sale conversion the other day which took 4 years! no joke. We tracked it using the the above, so it does work if you are in such a business model.

Great perspective, it's interesting how PR can be tracked with the help of SEO professionals, especially using Analytics.

Our account team recently worked with the PR firm of an eCommerce client, and were able to provide interesting perspective on geo-based performance of their initiatives. Based on this Analytics data, they were able to make more concrete decisions about which areas to focus on by seeing which cities/counties had more conversions and engagement after initiatives were launched.

Of course, the fact that the client had low brand recognition made it easier to correlate these PR efforts with website conversion performance in different geographies, but was still an interesting case nonetheless.

Always great to see how teams can come together to create better performance. :)

Great points today. I've got an English as a Second Language site, and I offer lots of free files and games there. Most of the products are $0.99 and my top of the funnel eBooks are $0.99 as well.

The thing I've noticed the most is that the $1.99 to $4.99 products don't move at all hardly. The bottom of the funnel $9.99 eBook really moves, however, and in print format, it does well too. I think it's because that bottom of the funnel product really packs a punch (101 ESL ideas) and it might be marginalizing those middle of the funnel products.

What's more, I think by offering so many free items at the top of the funnel, I may be hurting myself, or at least creating the feeling among users that there's no reason to go down the funnel at all. All in all, just good stuff to be thinking about on a continual basis.

Thanks for this one. In terms of measuring 'seredipity' we have a few things we do

Event-specific discount codes or incentive

Analytics 'Behaviour'-tagged shortlinks for Social Media (helps to identify whether social media activity led to enquiries)

Tailored Bit.ly links for specific posts/news releases.

It's hard to value those things, and sometimes the conversion comes well after the event or activity, but you can but specific things into each activity to begin to gauge its impact or interest level on a per-activity basis.Hope this helps someone :)

For tracking (depending on size of client you're working with) - I'm a fan of Google Trends as well as the Adwords keywordplanner to track [brand] search volume or [brand + kw] search volume. Not exact, but directional. Obviously Moz tools are helpful here as well and various social/link/inbound tools if you design your campaigns well enough to understand what results to watch for as discussed above. Hopefully we all are....

I'm also a fan of custom landing pages when it makes sense. Easy way to help track impact from different events and campaigns that might otherwise might skew nebulous. Gianluca Fiorelli's comment on using custom shortened URL's with tracking is also a favorite of mine.

Now for the great part - I really appreciated your honesty, Rand, on the difficulty of control. This is clearly not discussed in digital marketing as much as it should be - especially by agencies and companies that are heavily invested in their data-driven approaches.

I hope that we can all quickly come to an understanding that we deal with directional indicators (yes, they are far better now than they were when we didn't have the digital tools we do now and things didn't happen online) that provide good glimpses into what's happening, but are 99% of the time impossible to completely say with 100% accuracy what's happening. Fortunately, we don't need 100% to make good decisions, but I believe it's also a mistake to not acknowledge the challenges we face and possibilities for error.

Great topic and good to see this discussed in Moz . Assigning value to top-of-funnel marketing channels and understanding how they interact is hard, but not impossible. The approaches you suggest are based on a control group approach (with variables by segment, channel/tactic, time) and of course this is sound.

Another, well known approach which has been adopted by FMCG brand marketers for decades s marketing mix modeling (MMM) which models the cause and effect relationships between fluctuations in ad impressions to business outcomes using econometrics.

The proviso is that to build up an accurate picture using MMM you need a minimum threshold of data. This means that events, certain types of trade marketing and PR are not really suited to this approach

Marketing mix modeling is particularly efective for businesses which generate large amounts of impression and conversion data (such as television with FMCG) and has been traditionally very expensive to implement, so has been the remit of media agencies and blue chip consulting houses.

New developments in technology means that marketing mix modeling approach is now much more accessible to different types of businesses . I work for such as business (www.optimine.com) and when we look at client data the disparity between what the accepted ROI for specific channels and the "real ROI" according to MMM is significant.

Trusting in ideas when you don't have solid metrics is the reason I have my job! My career is centered around Top-of-Funnel strategies. I've gotten used to the fact that not all of my team's efforts can be tracked and reported on in an accurate way. You just have to trust that the work you are doing is helping even if you can't dissect graphs of your every move in Analytics. Thanks for your words of encouragement, Rand!

Measuring is definitely difficult but its also important to make an attempt so that you are making sure you are gettting some bang for your buck. We always recommend to have some good marketing technology / automation in place. Some info in this blog - http://bit.ly/1y8afCQ

We find that these efforts are extremely hard to track for success (if we are determining sales as the success metric) as they are largely awareness items and not consumer when the customer is interested in purchasing. I was surprised to see them omitted from your list.

Great video again Rand. I do a lot of work creating ToFu (great acronym) content and we sometimes struggle to see if it's having the kind of impact we want and I know my coworkers who work with clients can have a difficult time convincing clients of the benefits of ToFu content. I know that one thing we do is that we'll use tagged URLs when using Social Media to promote some of our content so that we can track at least some of the impact.

However, I think there are a lot of aspects of ToFu content that really is unmeasurable. For example, the more often your name gets out there (either through branding efforts or just by consistently putting out content that somebody sees) the more likely they are to eventually come to you and have no idea how they first heard of you.

I worked at a newspaper for years before joining the internet marketing world, and I know we saw several studies where people were asked how they had heard about a company's special and many of them either didn't know or thought it was from a medium that had not been used in the marketing campaign. I think ToFu content is often like other types of TOMA (Top-Of-Mind-Awareness) advertising efforts where you have to make sure your name is out there consistently so that people are aware of who you are and what you do.

As a marketer I totally get why we need to measure stuff and show ROI...As a business owner (Hustler) if we always feel pressured into the return we tend not to hustle or even stretch ourselves. My biggeat top leaval funnel - the 3 biggest deals I ever made, one in Shanghai, one in London and one in Lossiemouth (at a friends wedding) were all when I was outside of a venue having a smoke......cough cough !!

Excellent white board Friday. It's simple. All the major successes use an integrated marketing approach. The more touch points the better. Media multiplier effect kicks in. Whilst it is really difficult to gauge effect from the highest part of the funnel, passing through the 'awareness' stage of the customer journey is, of course, vital. I believe some of the marketing automation tools out there such as Hubspot can visualise impact of some of these early brand encounters.

Thanks Rand for the info ! Actually in our agency we struggle the same to justify some Technics. So most of the time experience or past projects give us some insights. But tracking is hard and some people will rather focus on the the BO FU :p What I do like too

I like using social advertising to spread content for top-of-the-funnel awareness and to share audience/target content to show we're engaging and helping share their content. Seems to work. If you can tie that awareness to on-site micro conversions (social clicks, follows), it helps ease the worry w/out hard metrics (sales,leads).

Great talks, two weeks in a row! Talk about serendipity, we are, right now starting to plan Content and PR efforts for next year. Last week, the concept around needing to set different ROI goals for different types of content was a real lightbulb moment for me. The issue was that I was asking myself was, "How do I measure this top of funnel stuff?", and BOOM here it is. This is exactly the type of information I was needing to connect all the dots (or at least try to). Thank you, thank you!

Great Post! Totally agree with Gianluca that something as simple as a unique URL handed out at certain events/talks/coffee mornings etc... can be of use when it comes to reporting back results to the hierarchy. Ultimately, for many smaller businesses, an educated opinion is what is needed with "top of the funnel" marketing as to ensure you are seen exactly where your customers expect you to be seen.

For the vast majority of marketers, campaigns, and businesses, an econometrics approach isn't going to work - they don't have the scale, sophistication, or ability to remove variables in such a way to make that a realistic part of their measurement. Brands who are at scale, of course, should and do apply that process (here's an interesting example applied to a large restaurant brand for social media: http://www.slideshare.net/bla_admin/measuring-soci...).

Maybe in the future, as we work on 1Metric and a content analytics product, we can start to provide some of that type of insight, but I'm not sure a full-fledged model would work for any but the biggest orgs.

Awesome post. Loved this comment: "press and PR, or a coffee and a beer meeting, or going to conferences and events, oftentimes takes a long time to show its value." Couldn't agree more - it takes time for sure, but everything worth doing does - especially when it comes to marketing!

It seems like this kind of test could be run on an annual basis, perhaps during the slowest month of the year, in terms of either traffic or conversions. At least that way the seasonal variable could be controlled.

A comparison from year to year, taking into account the yearly rise, (hopefully), or fall would eliminate the source of at least one important variation. I can clearly see your point here, that there are too many uncontrolled variables to make this evaluation anything more than an educated guess, rather than a scientific study.

BTW, has anyone claimed that SEO is a science anyway? Is it merely dodging the issue to say that SEO is a blend of art and science? Google would like everyone to think that it is pure science based on strict algorithmic logic, but I am skeptical, since search is based on human behavior. I would argue that it is perhaps one of the fairly well quantifiable human interactions, since it is human to computer, but certainly not one of the easiest, by any means.

Perhaps we should leave this entire topic alone, as long as we can continue to charge our customers hefty sums for SEO, since the art of SEO will never be fully scientific. What say you Rand, since you are now out of the SEO direct biz, meaning few to no direct clients? You should be able to be more objective than most of us. Just curious, and trying to spark a bit of controversy here.

Interesting thoughts. I'll give you that analyzing what does and doesn't work at the TOFU presents challenges, but you won't win much cred with the boss by shrugging your shoulders and saying, "ooh that's hard."

There are a lot of good ideas here, but I'll add you should select exactly what to measure, even if you're speculating about its impact, and measure it. I wrote an extensive "what's what" in content analytics post (so it won't help analyzing beer meetings) that will be helpful to those who want to consider their options and take action.